stick to baseball

→ October 17, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/17/20.

Just one piece this week for subscribers to the Athletic as I work on the top 40 free agents ranking, which will run a few days after the World Series ends: Nick Groke, our Rockies beat writer, asked me a bunch of questions about Colorado’s farm system, and I dutifully answered them. Klawchat, board game reviews, and dish posts should return next week.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was my old partner-in-crime Eric Karabell, although Bias Cat did not make an appearance. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’m due to send out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter this weekend as well. We’ll see how that works out for me.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

The New England Journal of Medicine has just weighed in on the election, urging Americans to vote Trump out of office, the first time it’s done so in its 208-year history. This comes on the heels of Scientific American and Nature doing the same. The Lancet published an editorial calling on governments to act now in accordance with the science, attacking the so-called herd immunity approach and supporting continued attempts to control the virus’s spread.

Now some longreads: ProPublica details the fall of the CDC, undermined from above by the anti-science Trump Administration and from within by craven, spineless leadership.

David Wallace-Wells writes for New York that there’s still no plan to stop the pandemic, a third crest is approaching, and we’re basically waiting until January – and hoping that brings a functional government – to do anything about it. Imagine how quickly this Administration would have committed a few billion dollars to responding if 200,000 Americans died from terror attacks rather than a virus.

The President and his children have turned the government into a sort of personal ATM, as exposed by this New York Times investigative piece, which you’d think would be the sort of thing to turn off the very voters who said they wanted him to drain the swamp.

Sara Benincasa’s essay “Fred and Me” is just wonderful and I won’t spoil it in the least.

Scientists confirmed that a Nevada man caught COVID-19 twice, requiring assistance breathing the second time around, which has some unpleasant connotations for the future of the pandemic and should end any discussion of a strategy based solely around herd immunity.

Why has Germany handled COVID-19 better than its neighbors? By following the science, including implementing widescale, frequent testing.

Earlier in October, a group of people who’ve lost loved ones to the pandemic set up 200,000 chairs on a lawn facing the White House to protest the government’s inaction.

One of those who’ve died from COVID-19 was a 44-year-old husband and father of two young children in northern New Jersey. He leaves behind a two-year-old daughter and a six-month-old son.

QAnon, the batshit-crazy hoax embraced by multiple alt-right figures and now our sitting President, is tearing families apart as people become sucked into this utterly false conspiracy theory and alienate family members with their nonsense.

A new complaint alleges that ICE is torturing Cameroonian immigrants to try to coerce them into signing deportation documents.

A six-year period of horrendous weather may have exacerbated the 1918-19 Spanish flu pandemic.

Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP candidate for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Chris Coons, appeared on white-nationalist, anti-immigrant hate site VDare last month, not long before saying the Proud Boys provide security at her events. She has no chance to win, but still, Delaware Republicans should revoke their endorsement of her.

Neal Karlen was a close friend of Prince and interviewed him many times over a period of about a dozen years earlier in the musician’s career. He’s written a biography of Prince called This Thing Called Life (natch) and this excerpt tells how Prince was the loneliest person he’d ever met.

Draining the swamp update: A former patent litigator became a federal judge and is openly advising patent trolls to come to his court. This lets those trolls abuse the patent system (which has its own problems, but still) for their own profit, and ultimately American consumers will end up paying the cost.

Project Veritas, the grift run by so-called journalist James O’Keefe, bribed the brother of a Minneapolis councilman to say he was harvesting ballots for Rep. Ilhan Omar, a popular target of Islamophobes.

There may be a new, more efficient method of answering the traveling salesperson problem, which makes use of the geometry of polynomials to improve the results. A truly efficient solution probably can’t be found in polynomial time, which refers to the P vs. NP problem described in the book The Golden Ticket.

HBO Max has a new series called Patria, based on the bestselling novel by Fernando Aramburu. The Guardian explains how a novel about Basque separatists’ decades-long terror campaign became a global success.

Paul Heaton, former lead singer for the Housemartins and the Beautiful South, made a large donation to help the staff of the shuttered music magazine Q.

Several people sent me this story from the New York Times on how local bookstores are struggling to survive in the pandemic and lockdowns.

Irina Slavina, a Russian journalist who reported on excesses of the government’s security apparatus, killed herself via self-immolation in front of the Interior Ministry headquarters earlier this month.

This 2018 piece from Smithsonian magazine details some of the science behind the flavors of chocolate.

Board game news: The Princess Bride Adventure Book Game is out and exclusively on sale at Target.

The Kickstarter for Flora, a “semi-cooperative” game based on the Voynich manuscript, launched this week.

Greenbrier Games’ cooperative story-based game Lost Ones funded its Kickstarter in the first day.

Cascadia, from the publisher and artist behind the game Calico (which I haven’t played but hear is quite good), has already blown past its tiny funding goal.

The role-playing game designer outfit Roll20 is holding a 3-day virtual gaming con with proceeds to benefit a charity focused on racial justice.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, bookstores, chocolate, coronavirus, delaware, hoaxes, links, longreads, math, Music, prince, russia, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ October 4, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 10/4/20.

I had two pieces for subscribers to the Athletic this week, one on the top 20 players under age 25 in the postseason (before the first round began), and one this morning with my hypothetical ballots for the six player awards. I also held a video Q&A for the Athletic on Friday.

Over at Paste, I ranked the ten best games with polyomino (Tetris) tiles as part of their mechanics, which is a fairly common thing in recent games, with a huge run of them hitting the market in 2019-20.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Nick Piecoro, who covers the Diamondbacks for the Arizona Republic and a longtime friend of mine, almost since I first got into the writing side of the business. My own podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.

I’ll have a new edition of my free email newsletter on Monday, now that I have a few more articles to include.

As the holiday season approaches, I’ll remind you every week that my books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts for the baseball fan or avid reader in your life.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: In the New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe, who won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Non-fiction for his book Say Nothing, explores the world of the modern private detective, including an anecdote of how PIs helped free Meek Mill.

By now you’ve probably seen the New York Times exposé on Donald Trump’s near-zero payment of income taxes and extensive use of questionable deductions to avoid paying. I paid more in federal income taxes in the last half of September than Trump did in all of 2017.

The USL, the country’s Division II professional men’s soccer league, had a serious issue in a game last week between Phoenix and San Diego, where a player on the former used a homophobic slur against a player on the latter. Two of my colleagues at the Athletic have the story on the incident and the fallout, where San Diego coach Landon Donovan pulled his team from the field and forfeited the match.

Also at the New Yorker, Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money, exposes the real reasons Fox News fired Kimberly Guilfoyle, including harassment and creation of a hostile work environment. Guilfoyle is now one of Trump’s main surrogates on the campaign trail and a big part of his attempts to reach women voters.

BBC News shows how the oil industry has spent over thirty years working to make people doubt the existence of climate change. It’s worked, and we’ve now lost valuable time we could have spent trying to slow or stop it.

One man who continued to go out in public for eight days after he first fell ill with COVID-19 has caused a cluster by exposing dozens of other people, at least nine of whom have tested positive, in upstate New York.

A different man flouted a mask mandate at a hotel frequented by visitors to the Cleveland Clinic, as did members of his family. That man has since tested positive for COVID-19, meaning that his actions last week potentially exposed dozens of people who are in close contact with patients to the virus.

Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) tweeted a thread on Russian interference in the 2020 election and the executive branch’s unwillingness to investigate it.

Editors and staffers at the NYU student newspaper The Washington Square News resigned en masse to protest a hostile work environment created by their faculty adviser, Keena Griffin. Their claims include racial insensitivity and transphobic comments. Dr. Griffin is the president of the College Media Association, and the CMA has announced its own investigation.

Jonathan Last writes in The Bulwark that President Trump showed in last week’s debate that he’s a sociopath – and that 60 million Americans like him that way.

Why did the CDC soften a report on safety conditions at meatpacking facilities in April, during the early days of the pandemic?

There’s a longstanding cultural movement in the two Congolese capitals of Kinshasa (the D.R.C.) and Brazzaville (The Republic of Congo), where people of all ages dress extremely snazzily, regardless of their circumstances or where they live. This BBC photo-essay shows these sapeurs in their stylish clothes, including people who break gender norms and children who found their love of fancy outfits early in life.

It took Youtube a few days but they finally removed a video by right-wing nutjob Josh Bernstein where he said that Ilhan Omar “should be executed,” referring to her as a female dog.

I watched the Spanish-language film Monos, which was Colombia’s submission for last year’s Academy Award for Best International Feature Film last year, this past week, and will write about it in the next few days. The Guardian had an interesting article from last October on how brutal the shoot was in the high-altitude jungles of southern Colombia.

McSweeney’s brings us “Hemingway writes The Baby-sitters Club,” which I appreciated more because I’ve seen the excellent adaptation of the books that debuted on Netflix this summer.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, climate change, coronavirus, detectives, food safety, links, longreads, soccer, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ September 26, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/26/20.

Nothing new this week at the Athletic, but I’m hoping to write two pieces this upcoming week to make up for it.

I reviewed the light resource-management and tile-placement game Cosmic Colonies for Paste this week; it’s a fine enough game, but I was left a little underwhelmed because it didn’t offer anything I hadn’t seen before in other games.

My guest on The Keith Law Show this week was my colleague at the Athletic Kaitlyn McGrath, talking about what it’s been like covering a team (the Blue Jays) she can’t see in person because they’re playing in the U.S. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Amazon, iTunes, and Spotify.

I’ve been keeping up with my free email newsletter better recently; my thanks to those of you who’ve signed up and who’ve sent kind notes in response to some recent editions. That said, I didn’t send one this week since … well, I haven’t had the muse much at all lately.

The holidays approach! My books The Inside Game and Smart Baseball make excellent gifts, or so I’m told by my editor and publicists.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: A new paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine details what we know about coronavirus transmission. The dominant route is respiratory; proximity is an extremely important variable; and proper ventilation appears to play a huge role in decreasing transmission. Also, “there is currently no conclusive evidence for fomite or direct contact transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in humans.” That topic came up in a few places recently, as the CDC posted and almost immediately deleted language that said that the virus could spread over distances of more than six feet.
My colleagues Britt Ghiroli and C. Trent Rosecrans wrote about MLB’s long-damaged relationship with the LGBTQ+ community in the wake of Reds announcer Thom Brennaman using a vile homophobic slur on air.
Authors David Mitchell (Utopia Avenue) and Jasper Fforde (The Constant Rabbit) appeared together on the Book Off! podcast to discuss their latest books and to recommend one book apiece for the show’s title segment.
The New York Times style magazine’s Ligaya Mishan looks at mushrooms, the “last survivors,” an increasingly popular source of food and raw material and, unfortunately, useless dietary supplements.
Scott Gottlieb and Mark McClellan, both former FDA Commissioners, wrote for the Wall Street Journal that the public can still trust an FDA-approved vaccine – as long as the agency isn’t bowing to political pressure in the approval process.
Dr. Paul Sax, who was a guest on my podcast back in the spring, wrote about the success of pro sports leagues in containing COVID-19 and what we can learn from them.
On the eve of the release of a trove of material from the recording sessions, the BBC has an oral history of Prince’s album Sign O’ The Times.
This is from May, but I hadn’t seen it before: the founder of JetBlue funded the highly dubious study out of Stanford that claimed that the infected rate in California was 85 times higher than reported. Prof. John Ioannidis failed to acknowledge that potential conflict of interest – and he continues to discourage governments, most recently Greece’s, from taking steps to control the pandemic.
Speaking of Stanford, new Trump adviser Dr. Scott Atlas was denounced in a public letter signed by roughly 100 of his former colleagues at Stanford’s School of Medicine. The letter calls out his “falsehoods and misrepresentations of science” regarding the COVID-19 pandemic. (Atlas is still at Stanford, now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute.)
MLB.com’s Alexis Brudnicki profiled Tom Burns, a scout for the Blue Jays, discussing his 30-year career in baseball. I worked with Tom at the end of my time in Toronto and he’s one of the best and kindest people I have met in this business.
Australian indie singer/songwriter Gordi had her spring tour with Bon Iver cancelled, so she returned to her previous career as a physician, offering her services to hospitals around Melbourne as they fight the pandemic.
Oliver Burkeman, author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, writes about telling the difference between what you want and what you need.
Even before we had the likely name of the new SCOTUS nominee, Harvard Kennedy School political scientist Maya Sen indicated that the appointment would likely move the court far to the right.
Some small bit of good news on the electoral front: Four Delaware progressives defeated Democratic incumbents in this month’s primaries, and that doesn’t include Sarah McBride, who is likely to become the highest-ranking transgender elected official in the country, or Kyle Evans Gay, who won the Senate primary in my district and for whose campaign I have volunteered. What’s most interesting about the primary upsets is the common theme that the incumbent Democrats were out of touch with the will of their constituents.
Multiple publicly traded companies used PPP funds, given out so firms hit hard by the pandemic would retain and pay employees, to buy back stock and/or pay out dividends to shareholders.
Mike Doughty is back with a new band, Ghost of Vroom 2, and just released an EP under that name. It’s definitely the most Soul Coughing-like stuff he’s recorded since that group broke up after El Oso. He spoke to Stereogum about the new project.
Board game news: There’s one Kickstarter for two new games from Pandasaurus, Dinosaur World and Dinosaur World: Rawr ‘n Write. It’s already at over 18 times its goal as of Thursday night.
The app version of the asymmetrical game Root is now available on iTunes, Android, and Steam.
The Kickstarter for Embarcadero has another week to go.
No link yet, but I got a review copy of the Princess Bride Adventure Game, which will go on sale on October 4th exclusively at Target.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: baseball, board game news, coronavirus, delaware, links, longreads, mushrooms, music news, stick to baseball

→ September 12, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/12/20.

I had several posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week. One was another scouting notebook looking at several top 100 prospects who debuted recently, including Ian Anderson, Ke’Bryan Hayes, and Deivi Garcia. Another looked at what the planned changes to the 2021 draft might mean in practice. The third was a Q&A with our Red Sox beat writer Jen McCaffrey, discussing the state of Boston’s farm system. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

Over at Paste, I reviewed Nova Luna, one of the nominees for this year’s Spiel des Jahres award. It’s a reboot of an earlier game called Habitats, rethemed and redesigned by Uwe Rosenberg (Patchwork, Agricola). It’s very good, and definitely good for family play with kids 8 and up.

I’ve resumed writing my email newsletter more regularly recently, helped by the resumption of the baseball season and a few other things that have made life a bit more normal. Also, here’s your reminder that my second book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, is available on bookshop.org and anywhere you buy books.

Charles Peterson, the Cardinals’ area scout in South Carolina and Georgia, has COVID-19 and is on a ventilator. You can join me in donating to his GoFundMe here … and maybe consider what it would be like to live in a country where we didn’t have to do this to pay our medical bills.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Susanna Clarke’s long-awaited second novel, Piranesi, comes out on Tuesday. The New Yorker has a lengthy profile of the author, who has suffered from an undiagnosed malady for much of the last fifteen years that sapped her energy and led to her writing hiatus.
BuzzFeed broke the story that billionaire Peter Thiel, who contributed significant funds to Trump’s campaign in 2016 and whose company Palantir holds numerous government contracts, cultivated contacts with white nationalist groups to gain their support for Trump before the last Presidential election, even meeting with the white supremacist Kevin De Anna.
Seattle Mariners prospect Taylor Trammell wrote a powerful essay for the Players’ Tribune that says that Baseball is Not Black Enough.
The Deadspin employees who resigned en masse last October have returned as Defector, a new, subscription-only site that promises the same sort of content Deadspin provided. The sports media world certainly has missed having some sort of watchdog to cover and spread
Here’s a discussion paper (equivalent, I think, to a pre-print, and not peer reviewed) that details the spread of COVID-19 as a result of the Sturgis motorcycle rally. And here’s a review of some problems in the pre-print.
The New York Times interviewed playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar, the new head of PEN America, a group that advocates for free expression and gives out numerous literary awards through its various chapters (including the PEN/Faulkner and PEN/Hemingway awards).
Regardless of what your bubble on the internet told you, the government did not break up a child sex trafficking ring in Georgia.
America Can’t Take Another Four Years of This Lethal Idiot.
A New York Daily News report found that the Trump Administration stole $4 million from a fund set up to pay for FDNY firefighters and medics still dealing with ill effects from 9/11.
Science spoke to Dr. Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist who testified before Congress in May and has emphasized the need for stronger measures to combat the pandemic.
Two-thirds of the world’s wildlife vanished in the last fifty years due to human activity.
Joe Arpaio, the disgraced former Sheriff of Maricopa County , is on Cameo, so a furry convention hired him to welcome them to Arizona – and he did it because he didn’t know what a furry was.
This meme seems like it will be useful forever:

pic.twitter.com/WY362C4r2I
— Ireland Simpsons Fans (@iresimpsonsfans) September 10, 2020

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arizona, baseball, biodiversity, coronavirus, environment, links, longreads, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ September 5, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 9/5/20.

I had three pieces for subscribers to The Athletic around the trade deadline, wrapping up the Padres’ three moves, the Blue Jays’ and Mets’ moves, and five other trades in separate columns. I also had two new episodes of The Keith Law Show this week, one featuring Jessica Luther and Kavitha Davidson, authors of the new book Loving Sports When They Don’t Love You Back (which you can buy here), and another one with Will Leitch, which we posted Friday morning so you’d have it before the holiday weekend.

On Friday night, September 11^th, I’ll be hosting a live talk with author Chuck Palahniuk about his new book The Invention of Sound through Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg. It’s a ticketed event, and with your purchase you’ll get a signed copy of the book as well as a link to the talk. (I just started reading the book about an hour ago.)

At Paste, I reviewed the tile-laying and set-collection game Succulent, and then ranked the five best tile-laying games I’ve played, which should include a few titles familiar to longtime readers.

I sent out a fresh edition of my free email newsletter on Friday, describing how I went from someone who hadn’t run in any meaningful way since 1985 to running 5 km without interruption in about four months.

And now, the links…

In a story since confirmed by other outlets, including Fox News, the Atlantic reported that President Trump referred to soldiers killed in action as “losers” and “suckers,” which, in a rational world, would end any support he received from current or former members of the U.S. military.

We will need a vast, coordinated effort to convince Americans of the safety of an eventual COVID-19 vaccine, or we will have too few people getting it to stop the pandemic. This assumes that Trump doesn’t coerce regulators into approving one before it’s adequately tested, and that very possibility is why we are where we are.

Kuli Kohli was born with cerebral palsy, and in the village in India where she was born her parents were encouraged to drown her. They eventually moved with her to the UK, where she’s now a poet, a mother, and a mentor to other women writers.

Daniel Thompson, the only full-time Black journalist at The Kenosha News, resigned his position to protest the paper’s use of an incendiary quote that cast protesters in an inaccurate light.

Larry Flynt wrote a “final farewell to the Falwells,” and it’s a more nuanced and thoughtful note than you might expect, with kind words about Jerry Falwell, Sr., with whom Flynt waged a very public battle over his First Amendment rights, and damning words about Falwell’s hypocritical son.

How did T. Denny Sanford, the richest man in South Dakota and a major Republican donor, get out of an investigation into his alleged possession of child pornography? ProPublica is asking for possible sources to come forward.

Online hoaxes, like the myriad ones about COVID-19, are making doctors’ jobs harder – and the blame falls primarily on Facebook and other sites that have let this misinformation fester.

Ars Technica reports that Facebook’s “plan” to combat election misinformation is the same as its plan for pretty much everything else that goes wrong on its site – doing nothing at all.

Philly Inquirer columnist Will Bunch says that Trump’s “reelection scheme of a civil war” is kicking into high gear as the election approaches. I was always skeptical of those who said Trump wouldn’t leave office willingly, but my view is shifting as his rhetoric changes, and the rest of his party continues to enable him.

Jean Guerrero, author of the new book Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, writes about how writers and critics have questioned whether she, as a Latina journalist, is ‘qualified’ to write a book about a white man. It’s another example of the longstanding white-centric and male-centric views of mainstream publishing.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine called for the elimination of Daylight Savings Time, citing a large body of evidence showing that DST is harmful to our health.

If you’re looking for an alternative to dairy milk, but are also concerned about the environmental damage wrought by almond production, the Guardian says oat milk is your best choice.

Three mathematicians have solved a longstanding question about straight paths on the dodecahedron, one of the five Platonic solids and the only one for which this question remained unsolved.

Board game news: Climate Crisis, a cooperative game with an educational goal, is about to end its Kickstarter run tomorrow.

The Days of Wonder crossover game Small World of Warcraft is now out in stores and online.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, environment, links, math, social media, south dakota, stick to baseball, the swamp, vaccines

→ August 29, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/29/20.

I had one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic, with scouting notes on Triston McKenzie, Sixto Sanchez, Wil Crowe, and Joey Bart. I also held a Klawchat on Thursday.

For Paste this week, I reviewed Succulent, a solid new game of tile-laying and set collection, and would have given it an even higher grade had I not had issues with some of the art and graphics.

My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Orioles reliever Dillon Tate, talking about youth baseball and overcoming the obstacles he faced on his path to the majors. You can also subscribe on iTunes – and if you do, please leave a rating and review.

You can still get my book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, where fine books are sold, like on bookshop.org. I’m also planning to send out another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The Guardian looks at the case of one Nigerian woman who fought back against the sex traffickers who enslaved her in Italy, and how difficult it is for authorities to prosecute such cases.
Harvard magazine has an excerpt from Prof. Daniel Lieberman’s new book Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding, looking at how exercise might help reduce the odds of age-related maladies from senescence to diabetes to Alzheimer’s, even cutting your chances of dying relative to others your age. One key message is that no matter how old you are it isn’t too late to gain these benefits from regular exercise.
Blockchain is “an amazing solution for almost nothing,” a widely-lauded technology that combines horrendous energy inefficiency with a lack of apparent benefits to end users.
The CTC Sentinel, published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, has a long explanation of QAnon as an emerging domestic terror threat. I have recently tried to explain the QAnon conspiracy theory to two different people who are not extremely online, and even trying to say it out loud makes me feel crazy. It’s like Scientology and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion had some sort of demon offspring. Anyway, this paper argues that “QAnon has contributed to the radicalization of ideologically motivated violent extremists,” which should make you a lot more nervous than the imagined threat of ISIS or similar terrorist groups infiltrating the United States.
If someone tries to argue with you that masks don’t work, here are 70 studies showing that they do.
A new case report published in the Lancet describes an 11-year-old girl who died one day after admission to the hospital of COVID-19-related cardiac failure. The condition is called multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS), and while rare, it is killing a very small number of children who contract COVID-19.
Several people who survived COVID-19 infections but continue to feel aftereffects are connecting online to try to gather data on and study their conditions so they can provide more information to others suffering the same problems.
There’s a surge in COVID-19 cases in Paris, so the French Prime Minister has mandated masks and stepped up testing. This is what a competent leader and evidence-based policymaking look like, in case you’d forgotten and were thinking about staying home on November 3^rd.
“Gullible” White House negotiators overpaid by up to $500 million for ventilators from the Dutch conglomerate Royal Philips N.V., paying about four times what the Obama Administration had contracted to pay. I thought that Trump was supposed to get the best deals.
Harvard Professor of Anthropology Gary Urton was effectively forced into retirement after multiple students accused him of sexual harassment.
A Florida couple who believed that COVID-19 was some sort of hoax ignored advice to observe distancing guidelines and wear masks. They caught the virus; both ended up in the ICU, and one of them died of complications from the disease. The lesson here isn’t that they’re stupid, but that they fell victim to all of the misinformation spread online by hoaxers, trolls, and by people speaking at this week’s RNC.
Speaking of the RNC, Madison Cawthorn, a Republican candidate for the state house in North Carolina, has a long history of fabrications and multiple accusations of sexual assault. He was lauded on Twitter by right-wing blue checkmarks as the future of the GOP.
The FDA ruled that all distilled spirits are gluten-free, because science.
Hardly surprising, but this New York Times piece finds evidence of discrimination against Black homeowners in the home appraisal process.
A Washington Post editorial asks where the sympathy is for Megan Thee Stallion after the rapper was shot by another rapper, Tory Lanez, pointing out that if a black man had shot a white woman the outrage would probably be much louder.
A new study from Ohio State researchers says that the Greenland ice shelf will melt due to climate change regardless of what we do to try to stop the warming trend.
Another book excerpt, this time from Reverend William Barber’s Winning the Green New Deal: Why We Must, How We Can, on the history and roots of environmental racism.
Why 2020 will be the death of the working mother.
Board game news: I have seen the game Maracaibo at PAX Unplugged but never played it, given its weight and time required, which meant it wasn’t going to get much play in my house. I’m thrilled to see it’s coming to digital next year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, climate change, coronavirus, harvard, italy, links, longreads, racism, stick to baseball, the swamp

→ August 22, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/22/20.

I had three posts for subscribers to the Athletic this week, one column on what’s going on each day over at teams’ alternate sites; and two scouting notebooks, one on Casey Mize, Dane Dunning, and Alec Bohm, and the other on Tarik Skubal, Dylan Carlson, and the Nats’ Luis García.

My guest on the Keith Law Show this week was my friend Craig Calcaterra, late of NBC Sports’ Hardball Talk and now the author of his own subscription newsletter Cup of Coffee. I also appeared on Blue Jays broadcaster Dan Shulman’s podcast Swingand a Belt, talking about what this lost minor league season means for prospects and the teams that employ them; and on the U.S. Army’s Mad Scientist program podcast The Convergence, talking about my new book, The Inside Game, and what might help people become better analysts in a world awash in data.

For Paste, I previewed many of the major board game titles due out for the rest of 2020, including the follow-up to Wingspan from Elizabeth Hargrave and a new game inspired by New Jersey’s infamous Action Park.

My free email newsletter returned this week, with thoughts on just how exhausting this science-denying, homophobic slur-using world has become.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: One reason why many of us feel so awful is that our cognitive ‘surge capacity’ is depleted, writes science journalist Tara Haelle, who provides suggestions to help us rebuild it.
The Washington Post profiles Tim Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, although in some ways I think it still let him off the hook for his decision to support a party and President that have both acted strongly against racial equality and justice in the last four years.
One reason so many people still fail to understand the seriousness of the pandemic’s spread is exponential growth bias, where we have a hard time intuitively understanding how that mathematical function works.
COVID deniers love to point to Sweden as a success story, since the country didn’t lock down yet seemed to have the pandemic under control. Sweden just reported its highest death toll for the first six months of a year since 1869. Their case fatality rate is also double that of neighboring Norway.
The rush to reopen bars and restaurants is a major reason why we can’t get this pandemic under control.
The CDC said we could likely control it in 12 weeks if most Americans wore masks and adhered to physical distancing guidelines.
Dr. Jen Gunter wrote in praise of “WAP” while criticizing longstanding, misogynistic taboos on the subjects of female sexuality and, er, natural lubrication.
Writing for Slate, Ray Suarez says that the NRA might not survive the New York state’s lawsuit to dissolve it. We should only be so lucky, after the NRA was a major reason the Violence Against Women Act was allowed to lapse in 2019.
Rush Limbaugh’s descent continued this week as he mocked Joe Biden for having lost multiple family members to tragic, early deaths, and then referred to Kamala Harris as a ‘ho’ and claimed she slept her way to various political offices.
The Atlantic‘s John Hendrickson looks at how 13-year-old Brayden delivered the best speech of this week’s Democratic National Convention. You can see the video of when Brayden first met Joe Biden, and how Biden encouraged Brayden not to let his stutter define or limit him.
A pilot project to release genetically modified mosquitoes that produce female eggs that die as larvae in the Florida Keys has received final approval. It could be a major step in controlling mosquito-borne diseases from malaria to Zika to dengue.
Writer Shakeia Taylor told the CBC that MLB isn’t doing enough to combat the structural racism within the industry.
Two Detroit police officers who coerced a 14-year-old boy into confessing to two murders who didn’t commit and who fabricated evidence in that case are still on the job and aren’t on the county’s do-not-call list of police officers who’ve committed crimes or other forms of misconduct.
Board game news: A few games were announced in the days after I filed my second-half preview, including Anno 1800, an adaptation of an Ubisoft video game by longtime designer Martin Wallace (Steam, Brass).
Meeple Mountain is giving away a copy of Fairy Trails, the new two-player game from Uwe Rosenberg.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: anti-science, board game news, coronavirus, longreads, science, stick to baseball

→ August 15, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/15/20.

I had one column this week for subscribers to The Athletic, looking at the demotion calculus in a short season with no minor leagues, plus notes on Spencer Howard, Ryan Castellani, and Luis Basabe. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

My podcast guest this week was Dr. Angela Duckworth, author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, discussing concepts from her book and how baseball scouts and executives might apply them – and how to avoid the pitfalls of using “intangibles” as a cover for more insidious biases. You can buy Grit here via bookshop.org.

You can also buy my new book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us about Ourselves, which came out this April, via the same site. I’ll send out the next issue of my free email newsletter as soon as my fall board game preview comes out over at Paste.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Carina Chocano spent hours taking MasterClass sessions and wrote about the product for The Atlantic, asking what it is they’re really selling since they’re not selling actual education.

At Slate, William Saletan lays out the timeline of how Trump’s bad decisions have led to over 171,000 U.S. deaths from COVID-19.

Current Affairs’ Nathan J. Robinson points how, increasingly, verifiable information is behind paywalls while alt-right bullshit is free, and looks at the consequences of that dichotomy.

Novelist Chimamanda Adichie suffered a concussion earlier this year, and wrote about the experience, including the introspection that came with the temporary loss of part of her brain function.

The World Health Organization has created a one-stop shop for correct answers to common myths about COVID-19.

The Delaware Interscholastic Athletic Association made the correct decision to delay fall sports until February. Some parents are pushing a petition to demand they reverse this, and the comments from parents in that article drip with ignorance and privilege.

A Florida church leader has been arrested for pushing the fake cure known as “miracle mineral solution” (MMS), which is really just bleach.

Mom influencers on Instagram are spreading anti-mask propaganda. Instagram is owned by Facebook and neither site seems willing to clean up their own shit.

Almost a third of elite sportswomen reported harassment or trolling on social media according to a survey by BBC Sport.

The opposition to masks is beyond belief at this point. You probably read about the sheriff in Marion County, Florida, who banned masks in his offices, and banned his deputies from wearing them. He eased those restrictions slightly after the backlash, but really, why is anyone objecting to mask mandates at this point other than ignorance or selfishness?

Putting more healthful, nutritious foods into school lunches appears to have improved health outcomes like obesity for children who receive them – so of course the Trump Administration’s USDA has rolled back those changes.

A major Iowa Republican donor who ‘somehow’ won a no-bid contract to provide PPE from China to the state is now under investigation for prostitution and possession of child pornography.

The Massachusetts Democratic Party helped a college group orchestrate a campaign to entrap and smear a local Democratic candidate for the state’s 1^st Congressional District.

That Georgia high school that suspended a student for taking a picture of all of the maskless kids packed in the halls as they resumed classes? They had to shut down for several days due to an outbreak.

Reproductive rights took a huge hit this week at the Supreme Court thanks to John Roberts’ conservative majority and their decision to allow several anti-abortion and outright misogynistic laws in Arkansas to stand.

There’s a massive oil spill in progress on the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius.

A telling comparison of the different speaker lists at anti-vaxx and pro-vaccine conferences.

We watched season one of Perry Mason on HBO and I agree with everything Alan Sepinwall said about it.

Board game news: There’s an Umbrella Academy card game in the works, for fans of that Netflix series.

I’ve never played Arkwright given its length and complexity, although it’s pretty highly regarded. Now there’s a simpler version coming as a card game, on Kickstarter this week.

I enjoyed Elizabeth Hargrave’s Designer Diaries around her newest game, Mariposas, due out later this month.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: arkansas, board game news, coronavirus, florida, georgia, iowa, links, longreads, massachusetts, reproductive rights, stick to baseball, tv, vaccines

→ August 8, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/8/20.

I wrote another scouting notebook column for subscribers to The Athletic this week, looking at Jo Adell, Jesus Luzardo, Touki Toussaint, Nate Pearson, Nick Madrigal, and more. On The Keith Law Show this week, I got together with my old friend Joe Sheehan to talk about this teetering disaster of a season so far.

For Paste, I reviewed Marvel Villainous: Infinite Power, the newest entry in the Villainous game series, this one with five new villains from the MCU, adding some new rules that mean these villains aren’t playable with any of the previous 15. I also ranked all twenty of the villains in the Villainous games so far.

I participated in a panel at Gen Con Online on using social media in tumultuous times, and whether there’s an obligation to use your social media accounts to support causes like BLM or other social justice endeavors.

My partner and I are among the co-hosts for a virtual event and fundraiser for Kyle Evans Gay, a Democratic candidate for the Delaware Senate, who is trying to flip our district blue. If you’d like to help us out and perhaps join the event on August 15th, you can buy tickets to the virtual event or just make a donation here. If you happen to live nearby, the full tickets also include dinner from V&M, an Italian restaurant in the district that has also been a takeout machine since the state first locked down in March.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Ed Yong continues his peerless coverage of the pandemic for the Atlantic with this massive look at the United States’ epic failure this year, from a federal government “denuded” of experts to a social safety net sewn out of dental floss to one of the least efficient health-care systems in the developed world. This article is a list of failures, a maddening series of decisions not to fund basic initiatives that might have slowed the spread of COVID-19. Instead, we have 4% of the world’s population but a quarter of its cases and deaths.
Reason looks at the emerging political philosophy of Peter Thiel, who claimed to be a libertarian but now supports nationalistic policies more commonly associated with fascism. Note that Thiel and his proxies supported travel bans to fight COVID-19; the link above this from Ed Yong explains why travel bans can actually exacerbate the spread of a new pathogen.
The Guardian Long Read has a mournful look at the last of the Zoroastrians, as one of the world’s extant religions is slowly dying out.
Politico explores how xenophobic activist David Horowitz helped mentor and create Stephen Miller, architect of this Administration’s worst anti-immigrant policies.
Iowa’s state epidemiologist medical director got a 45% raise plus $55,000 in overtime pay this year despite leading one of the nation’s most ineffective responses to the pandemic, which including blocking school districts from closing unless they met state standards for virus spread and refusing to implement a complete shutdown. I’m all for paying scientists what they’re worth, but Iowa is still seeing 14+ new cases a day per 100,000 residents.
You should not “do your own research” when it comes to science. People who say that are inevitably going to be wrong, because they lack the experience or knowledge to evaluate what they find in that “research,” and the results are dangerous to us all.
A Utah woman is facing life in prison for buying red paint that was used at a protest. Really – not Zimbabwe, or Saudi Arabia, or China, but Utah.
My friend Will Leitch wrote for New York about how watching sports simultaneously now feels meaningless and yet extremely powerful.
Jeff Gregorich, superintendent of schools for a district in the hinterlands of southeastern Arizona, told Eli Saslow of the Washington Post that there is no good plan to reopen schools, and that “it’s a fantasy” to think it can be done without people in the community getting sick and dying from COVID-19.
Colleges are reopening faster and more fully than primary schools, but that’s the reverse of how things should be, given how much better college-aged students can handle online learning.
NPR published this helpful pocket guide to COVID-19 etiquette, with tips like talking to people about ground rules when you’re going to see them later at a physically distanced gathering.
The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan wrote that this was the week American lost the war on misinformation, thanks to the President’s promotion of raging quack Stella Immanuel, although I’m pretty sure we lost this war a long time ago and it’s going to take state and national vaccine mandates to stop it.
Board game news: Starling Games will release Flourish, a lightweight game from the creators of the amazing Everdell, some time before the end of 2020.
An update to Ultimate Werewolf Extreme is now on Kickstarter, funding in just 18 hours.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, science, stick to baseball

→ August 2, 2020
→ By keith

Stick to baseball, 8/2/20.

I wrote two scouting notebook columns for subscribers to The Athletic this week, one on Dustin May, Luis Robert, Brady Singer, and others; the second on Nate Pearson, David Peterson, Zach Plesac, and more. I also held a Klawchat on Friday afternoon.

You can buy my latest book, The Inside Game: Bad Calls, Strange Moves, and What Baseball Behavior Teaches Us About Ourselves, anywhere you buy books, and I recommend bookshop.org. I sent out another edition of my free email newsletter this week as well.

I participated in one panel for the Gen Con Online Writers Symposium this year, on using social media in tumultuous times. It looks like it’s free for everyone to watch.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: Vanity Fair has an exclusive report on how a White House group led by Jared Kushner – who is both unelected and unappointed to any official role in the government – came up with a comprehensive national plan for testing and tracing back in the spring, only to have Kushner scrap it because the pandemic was hitting blue states much harder.
The Daily Beast looks at the alt-right sports site Outkick, which has been pushing COVID-19 hoaxes and misinformation since late February.
ProPublica has a useful guide to interpreting public COVID-19 data. One conclusion to bear in mind: deaths lag cases by a few weeks, so people celebrating lower death rates are often just misreading the data to support a desired conclusion.
OneZero looks at Pinterest’s difficulty in keeping offensive content off their platform, although I think the takeaway here is that they’re doing a much better job than Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube. Moderating content is always going to suck as a job, and moderators should be better compensated and cared for, but the problems described here pale next to what those other sites have.
The Guardian has an excerpt from James Nestor’s new book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.
“Hygiene theater” is a waste of time, writes Derek Thompson at the Atlantic. The novel coronavirus spreads primarily via the air, from people in proximity to one another and/or in enclosed spaces.
Twenty percent of Americans say they wouldn’t get a COVID-19 vaccine if one is available. We need better education and outreach to overcome that.
Since Jeva Lange’s piece on how baseball’s COVID-19 struggles are a microcosm of the U.S. as a whole ran, both situations have deteriorated further, with a rolling outbreak now in the St. Louis clubhouse.
This twitter thread from an OR doc shows how he talked a reluctant patient, who fell for fake information on the coronavirus he saw on Facebook, into getting a COVID-19 test.
Another Twitter thread, this one authored by a (self-described) lawyer, explains why the “Covington kid” probably got little or nothing in his settlement with the Washington Post.
Just days after her newest novel This Mournable Body was longlisted for the Booker Prize, Zimbabwean author Tsitsi Dangarembga (whose Nervous Conditions was #98 on my last top 100 novels list) was arrested during anti-government protests in Harare.
A Singaporean ‘consultant’ used LinkedIn to troll for contacts in his work as an agent for Chinese intelligence. Jun Wei “Dickson” Yeo pleaded guilty to an espionage charge in a U.S. court last month.
The British-Japanese musician Rina Sawayama found out she’s ineligible for the prestigious Mercury Prize and the BRIT Awards because she holds a Japanese passport. Those awards’ rules have “nationality clauses” that exclude her, even though she’s lived in the UK for 25 years, in part because she’s a solo artist; musical groups don’t have to comprise only British citizens.
A profoundly anti-gay state Senator in Arkansas called mask mandates “draconian,” and then was hospitalized with COVID-19. Guess his party affiliation!
U.S. Senator Tom Cotton (also of Arkansas) called slavery a “necessary evil” in building the United States, and is fighting attempts to introduce new historical perspectives on slavery into U.S. school curricula, such as considerations of the long-term impact of slavery on Black Americans.
Movie theaters have been mostly closed since March, so we are now relying on opaque claims from streaming services to determine when a movie is “a hit.”
Several ex-Deadspin staffers have banded together to create Defector Media, a new site that promises, at least, to fill the void left by Deadspin’s implosion last year.
Much “nutrition research” today amounts to p-hacking, writes Tamar Haspel, who helped expose … , in the Washington Post. She suggests more research on the effects of portion sizes, food delivery to people to keep them out of supermarkets, food and nutrition education, and more.
Society , a research journal published by Springer Nature, published a commentary by Prof. Lawrence Mead of NYU that argues that Black and Latinx people lack the ambition and temperament of European immigrants to rise out of poverty, leading to a massive backlash and quick retraction. NYU issued a statement decrying the paper’s sentiments while defending Mead’s academic freedom.
Board game news: The cooperative game Spirit Island is now available on Steam.
Renegade announced an upcoming game called Embarcadero, from one of the designers of Scoville, featuring hand management and tile-laying mechanics.
A number of publishers put together game bundles for sale during Gen Con Online, which took place from Thursday through Sunday, which would have been the dates for the regular convention had COVID-19 not led to its cancellation.
Serious Catan players might like these new game-specific accessories coming soon from a partnership between Gamegenic and Asmodee.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: africa, arkansas, baseball, board game news, coronavirus, links, longreads, mercury prize, nutrition, social media, stick to baseball, the swamp

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